Educ Res Policy Prac (2012) 11:717

DOI 10.1007/s10671-011-9125-6

Singapore: the Fourth Way in action?

Andy Hargreaves

Received: 28 February 2011 / Accepted: 31 May 2011 / Published online: 7 January 2012
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract This article has two main objectives. It first outlines the first three waves of
change termed by Hargreaves and Shirley (The Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2009) as the First, Second and Third
Way that defined global educational policy and practice since the 1960s. It then introduces
the main tenets of the Fourth Way, which is characterised by inspiring success stories of educational leadership and change that have led to remarkable leaps forward in student learning
and achievement. The Fourth Way is distinguished by a paradigm shift in the change mindset
of educational leaders of how they push educational frontiers to achieve a more sustainable
future. It is defined not merely as a destination but a journey in itself. Second, it considers
how Singapore presents an interesting case study of paving the Fourth Way through its many
forward-looking educational initiatives and fidelity in the implementation of these reforms.
In doing so, this article also sets the stage for the other articles in this volume which cover
different aspects of the Singapore education story, from pre-primary to tertiary education,
to teacher preparation, and leadership development to the internationalization of its teacher
education programmes and how educational research translates into policy and practice in
this unique nation.
Keywords Educational change Educational policy and practice Educational reform
and implementation Singapores education system

1 Introduction
This article first expounds the four ways of educational change, each distinguishable by its
exclusive features in education policy implementation and formulation, through the observance of historical patterns. These changes are shaped by the social landscape of a nation,

A. Hargreaves (B)
Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Campion Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill,
MA 02467-3813, USA
e-mail: andrew.hargreaves@bc.edu

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which is in turn framed by unique historical circumstances (Fullan 2009; Hargreaves 2009). In
the next section of this article, the predecessors of the Fourth Way, the first three ways, which
have influenced educational policy and its practice since the postwar era, will be described
to set the stage for the introduction of the main tenets of the Fourth Way. The Fourth Way
is distinguished by the strength and wisdom of leaders who are bold enough to make a paradigm shift in educational change to advance towards a more inspirational, innovative and
sustainable future for all (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). This change in mindset has led to
remarkable progress in student learning and achievement.
The final section narrows its focus upon how Singapore in many ways, through its development and change has embodied many aspects of the Fourth Way in its transformation to a
metropolitan city country which is one of the worlds most admired cities. Its educational and
economic success is undisputed but a fundamental question to ask isWhat will it require
Singapore to do or change to remain exceptional in this global economy? It is an important
reminder that all successful organisations and systems are at their most vulnerable at the peak
of their success and it is therefore vital for any high-performing system or organisation not
to rest on its laurels but to continually strive for improvement even when things seem to be
going well.

2 The first three ways

This section provides an overview of the first three ways of educational change that serve to
set the stage for proposing the Fourth Way. The observations about educational change are
largely based on the US and Canada as case studies.
2.1 The First Way: innovation and inconsistency
The origins of the First Way trace back to the end of World War II and extend all the way to the
mid-1970s. The post-war milieu in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and UK led to a
widespread presence of bottom-up government support coupled with extensive proliferation
of secondary and higher education (Fullan 2009; Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). Spending
on education was perceived as an investment rather than a drain on the economy. This was
built on the assumption that the professionals within the educational sector had the capability
to utilise the resources apportioned to them in an equitable and efficient manner without the
need for external governmental interventions (Fullan 2009; Hargreaves and Shirley 2009).
Fundamentally, the First Way was propelled by the underpinning philosophies of parity, justice and opportunity. In some respects, it was also experimental and innovative (Hargreaves
and Shirley 2009).
Towards the mid-1970s, the First Way reached its breaking point when innovation in
schools occurred in small clusters, but was unable to permeate across institutions to attain a
more systemic impact. The lack of coherence in leadership and great disparity in achievement
standards across schools led to the eventual downfall of the First Way. Strauss and Howe
(1997) described the regression as the moment of awakening in the history of the US. The
First Way was placed under public scrutiny when cash ran dry during the first oil crisis in
1973 and prior investment seemed to have little consistent effect in reducing inequity in
educational opportunities (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009; Rajan 2010). Consequently, governments reduced their investment in education due to the economic recession caused by the
oil crisis and their inability to provide the population with a consistent quality in education.

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Initial government backing and professional openness in the First Way led to innovation
and new social initiatives. However, it also caused inconsistent school performance, unpredictable leadership and educational improvements informed by intuition and ideology rather
than through any evidence-informed initiatives (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009).
2.2 The Second Way: markets and standardization
The decline of the First Way led governments to conclude that to attain consistency and
excellence across the educational system, there was a need for more rigidity, jurisdiction,
regulation and competition. Consequently, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, educational
policy tended to shift as many resources as possible from the state to the market. The United
States President then, Ronald Reagan and Britains Prime Minister then, Margaret Thatcher
emphasised letting the market do whatever it could and subcontracted education services to
private organisations in an attempt to shrink the cost of public disbursement (Fullan 2009;
Hargreaves and Shirley 2009) through prescribed frameworks and goals. Whilst some schools
adapted quickly, others struggled to grapple with the combination of centralized structures
and directives. The schools were expected to work with decentralized accountability during
this period of great uncertainty (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). Finally, during Bill Clintons
tenure as President of US in the early 1990s, the emergence of strong government control
over the market and standardization of educational goals began to develop (Hargreaves and
Shirley 2009).
During the early 1990s, the governments of many countries including Australia, parts of
Canada, New Zealand, the US and UK imposed firm, clear and high standards of centralized
performance. These government jurisdictions imposed varying degrees of heavy top-down
control including prescribing educational reforms through increasing competition amongst
schools through the announcement of school ranking and performance league tables, scripted
curricula, reduction in the professional development of teachers, and sanctions on as well as
greater surveillance of teachers to ensure that they comply strictly with teaching standards
(Fullan 2009; Ladd and Fiske 2003; Sahlberg 2010). Alongside the growth of standardization and accompanying implementation, there was minimal bottom-up funding from the
government for resources and materials. Consequently, this resulted in the shortage of trained
teachers, the quality of pedagogy began to fall as teachers were compelled to comply with
the curriculum religiously, and were unable to exercise their own professional capacities
(Hargreaves 2003). This move resulted in strong competition amongst schools which led
to practices that compelled schools to innovate in the ways they enroll their students and
deliver their programmes whilst some ill-equipped institutions suffered due to the ripple
effects of brighter students leaving for schools with selective admission criteria; and were
made to absorb students of schools that had closed down due to fierce market competition
(Hargreaves and Fink 2006; Hargreaves and Shirley 2008). Nations paid a great price for
the move towards market competition and educational prescriptions that were standardized,
uniform and egalitarian. This led to colossal opportunity costs in student learning, teacher
motivation, quality of teachers and the quality of leadership within the schools (Ladd and
Fiske 2003; Hargreaves 2003). Unsurprisingly, the Second Way eventually reached its limit
as had the First Way, and thus led to a new Third Way of educational and social change.
2.3 The Third Way: performance and partnership
With the fall of the First and Second Way, the Third Way may be best seen as being in
between both the first two ways but also moving beyond them with the advancement of

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theory and strategy. More bottom-up support was provided along with the maintenance and
indeed increase in top-down pressure. This was exhibited through the provision of pervasive professional development for teachers, and increase in lateral collaboration to inspire
the teaching profession and its leadership. This spurred the growth of professional learning
communities, and professional networks where teachers can learn from others within the
fraternity, and schools can learn from other schools over time (Fullan 2009).
Nevertheless, despite its aspiration to revive the ill-stricken education system, the Third
Way faced a roadblock due to three paths of distraction (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009).
These paths were not what the Third Way had intended but exerted a significant effect on its
effectiveness and impact.
The first path of distraction is known as the path of autocracy. The Third Way turned
its spotlight upon professionalism and governance, calling upon public employees and other
professionals to align themselves with imposed policies and practices, and to meet prescribed
system performance targets to improve their performance in areas as diverse as health, public
transportation and education. In education, this took the form of imposing system targets
in tested student achievement on the teaching profession as an accountability measure of
professional and systemic performance. Despite the emphasis on professionalism, the system became more despotic by emphasising bureaucratic accountability above professional
responsibility. Although educators were deemed to be professionals, they did not receive the
trust and respect that benefits a professional since the leadership required them to document
and report their every move (Hargreaves and Shirley 2008). Educational goals overemphasized literacy and numeracy, resulting in schools and teachers becoming less creative and
innovative with the curriculum (Madiratta 2010).
The second path of distraction is known as the path of technocracy. This refers to the
excessive preoccupation with data in the education system. Policy makers and school leaders
prided themselves on being data-driven, based on the assumption that if they had more data
about more people, they would then be able to monitor what every teacher was doing in every
school in real time. They surmised that once teachers are made permanently accountable, they
would then be able to nip any problems of the system in the budintervening just-in-time as
any problem arose. It was presumed that all achievement gaps could be detected then corrected
from the data; however, schools and school systems often misused and misinterpreted the
data and research findings (Datnow 2011; Hargreaves and Shirley 2008), and placed undue
emphasis on taking short-term measures that quickly and sometimes cynically improved
measurable results rather than on undertaking longer-term transformations in teaching and
learning. Misuses of data also led to adverse effects especially when performance data were
used to grade and humiliate struggling schools and teachers (Datnow 2011; Hargreaves and
Shirley 2008).
The third path of distraction is known as the path of effervescence. In the Third Way,
teachers were charged to participate in professional learning communities (PLC). Whilst the
original intention of the PLC was to engage teachers in lively dialogues about and inquiries
into teaching and learning, they often degenerated into meetings about statistics, test results
and short-term fixes rather than longer-term resolutions revolving around deeper goals about
teaching and learning (Datnow 2011). In Paynes (in Mediratta 2010, p 56), study of why
urban schools appear not to be achieving their goals despite the many reforms in the US, he
found that the teachers were typically skeptical, apathetic, and tend to blame others for their
instructional failures. This negativity in turn affected the capacity of PLCs to cultivate rich
communities of learning.
How do these first three ways compare to Singapores phases of educational development? Singapores period of survival-driven education precedes even the First Way, as it did

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in other countries with its concentration on establishing a basic system of universal access
and the foundations of instruction. Its period of efficiency-driven education extending into the
1990s has some characteristics of the First Way with its emphasis on widening educational
access and increasing Government investment; along with some Second Way elements of
centralized bureaucratic control of curriculum and examinations, and an emphasis on highly
competitive performance and streaming by ability. The key question now, as an issue not
just of nomenclature, but of purpose and direction is whether the period of ability-based,
aspiration-driven education beginning with Teach Less, Learn More in 1997 constitutes a
Third or a Fourth Way of educational change, or something else altogether? To this end, we
need to examine what a Fourth Way of educational change encompasses.
2.4 Metamorphosis: towards the Fourth Way
The failure or exhaustion of the first three ways raises questions about what ways now lay
ahead. The next section describes the Fourth Way that espouses more solid principles and
pillars for educational change and which offers greater hope for a sustainable future.

3 The Fourth Way

Based on extensive research of high-performing education systems, school districts and networks comprising a study of Finlands educational system, of a network of 300 secondary
schools in England, of the province of Alberta in Canada and of the Tower Hamlets school
district in UK, it has been possible to discern and distill a set of powerful principles of educational change that these extraordinarily successful yet also quite varied systems hold in
common. This Fourth Way of educational change that embodies these principles approaches
education in a holistic manner; weaving the national vision, professional participation and
public collaboration within one nation to form a social fabric that bonds its people (Fig. 1).
3.1 Anchors of the Fourth Way
The Fourth Way is anchored upon six pillars of purpose and partnership that support change,
three principles of professionalism that drive change and four catalysts of coherence that help
sustain change.

Fig. 1 The Fourth Way showing

coherence between National
vision, professional participation
and public collaboration (adapted
from Hargreaves and Shirley
2009)

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First, central to the success of the Fourth Way is the existence of a national vision that
defines clearly where the country is heading. A nation needs a clear sense of who they
are, what they are, why they are and where they are heading. A compelling, inclusive and
inspirational vision of social, economic and educational development provides individuals
with a sense of direction and purpose, cultivating citizenry and responsibility for the society
to motivate excellence in performance (Hargreaves and Shirley 2008). Furthermore, there
is an overarching need to nurture professional collaboration between teachers and schools
and to empower educators to reconfigure and transform curriculum and pedagogy to engage
their students (Hargreaves and Shirley 2008). Educators need to feel that their solidarity is
more valuable to the professional fraternity than their solitary achievements (Hargreaves and
Shirley 2008; Mediratta 2010). Third, a progressive nation requires public engagement where
the government loses some if its direct control over the profession but where there is more
democratic inclusion of the public in deciding the direction that the society and its schools are
heading. Public engagement implies that whilst professionals gain more autonomy from the
government, they have less autonomy from the public, parents and communities who are now
engaged more directly with their childrens education and with the direction of educational
improvement more generally (Hargreaves and Shirley 2008).
3.1.1 Six pillars of purpose and partnership
As in a building structure, pillars provide stability and support for change. The Fourth Way
is supported by six such pillars.
The first pillar is that of an inspiring and inclusive vision. Top talents are captivated by
a purpose-driven career and a vision that propels them to reach up and out. An inclusive
vision knits the people together and inspires them to be resilient despite the difficulties they
may encounter (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). Finland and Singapore had each bitten the
bullet and withstood the great challenges their societies faced because the people believed
in their cause. Schools continued to persevere despite failures and rejections as the vision
inspires them to carry on. Therefore, when an inspiring and inclusive vision calls out for
sacrifice, people will readily stand up to the occasion as vision empowers them to see beyond
the present difficult circumstance that surround them (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). It is
inspiring visions rather than imposed system targets that are most likely to move a whole
school or system forward successfully and sustainably.
The second pillar is that of public engagement. This goes beyond outreach to the public
and is about building trust between the schools and communities, and involving the public in
the development of educational policy and practice (Hargreaves and Shirley 2008; Mediratta
2010). Every engagement with a parent is an opportunity to influence the society at large
about the achievements and aspirations of public education for their own children and those of
others. In the face of an uncertain future, parents tend to cling on to what is familiar, inciting
competition rather than collaboration amongst themselves and their children. Keeping the
public informed of and being engaged in the development and changes within the education
system reduces public anxiety and helps parents and others to align their focus and to support
the schools. Active trust is built upon relationships and communication. Resistance to change
is often a result of lack of information or relationships.
The third pillar is that there can be no achievement without investment. Without investment, it is impossible to raise standards sustainably. Like the concept in business, there is no
achievement possible without the requisite investment in education. Reducing achievement
gaps between the rich and poor goes beyond merely pouring more resources into the schools,
of course. A good education system does not just produce top talents; it raises the standard of

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education for all. High-performing nations benefit as a result of strong public investment not
just in education, but also in housing, medical care, social services and community development to ensure that the nation is not just for the rich, but for all a countrys men and women.
Whilst schools contribute a great deal, they are not expected to achieve miracles by themselves. Therefore, parents and community members have to increase parental responsibility
at home to be on par with the greater professional accountability in the school.
The fourth pillar is about responsible corporate involvement in education. This calls for
another level of accountability from the business sector. In this partnership between the
corporate and education sector, accountability is mutual and open. Businesses should seek
opportunities to improve education through their business and view it as a moral community
responsibility.
The fifth pillar advocates that students should be partners in change and in leadership.
Students can be involved in many ways, such as learning, assessment, coaching, leading and
even in cases of racial reconciliation; students have the ability and capacity to change how
education is done. When the change is student initiated, they feel a great sense of ownership
to see that it succeeds because the idea originated from them.
The final pillar is about mindful teaching and learning. It is an approach to teaching
that goes beyond the implementation of a script or a quick fix to an external need
(MacDonald and Shirley 2009). It is more about mindful, deeply engaged, critical and challenging teaching and learning. In this understanding, lifelong learning takes learning beyond
the confines of the school, throughout life, and learning is about life and for life. The lifelong learner takes the initiative, solves problems, innovates and seizes every opportunity to
contribute to the greater good. In Singaporean terms, mindful teaching and learning is about
preparing pupils for the test of life, not a life of tests.
3.1.2 Three principles of professionalism
The six pillars described in the previous section provide the support needed for educational
change to take place but it is teachers sense of professionalism that ultimately drives the
impetus for change. This section describes three principles that drive professionalism: high
quality teachers, positive and powerful professional associations and lively learning communities.
First, high quality learning is reliant on the ability of a nation to attract and retain high
quality teachers. In Finland, teachers are drawn to the nations inspiring and inclusive vision,
which accords high status to their teachers. Whilst they are paid just about the OECD average,
teachers are drawn to the profession for intrinsic and altruistic reasons especially because
they subscribe to the vision of the crucial role they play in nation building. A motivating work
environment that values and trusts its teachers and empowers them to be leaders in the curriculum they develop and deliver, accounts for the high retention rate of teachers in Finland.
All teachers in Finland hold a Masters degree, and apart from assuring quality of teachers
of educational qualifications, this also contributes to the sustainability and stability of the
success of the high-performing education system. Teacher training is rigorous, practical and
intellectually stimulating and prepares teachers for the demanding profession that lies ahead
(Hargreaves and Shirley 2009). In summary, it is investment in the overall mission, social
status, working conditions and rewards of teaching coupled with the quality and timing of
teacher training which help attract and retain high quality teachers in Finland (Hargreaves
and Shirley 2009).
Second, is the dynamic role of teacher unions and professional associations. The Fourth
Way encourages professional associations to promote teacher advocacy and to be actively

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engaged in improving teaching and learning even when it challenges their members. Unions
and professional associations should cherish their ability to raise professional standards
amongst their members to increase their reputation and transparency in the society. Teachers
associations should address the publics wish for a profession that places utmost importance
on the welfare of children under its charge. Association such as the Teacher Union Reform
Network (TURN), the Alberta Teachers Association and the California Teachers Association (CTA) have been trailblazers of this movement, endorsing the highest standards of public
service through promoting continual, lifelong learning for all their members in the service
of improved learning and outcomes for students.
The third principle of professionalism is that of lively learning communities. Collaborative
communities of teachers are strongly associated with improved retention rates amongst new
teachers and increased student success. Teachers in the best PLCs are committed to transforming teaching that translates into learning outcomes for their students. With evidence
provided by data and shared experience, they also value their relationships with members of
the PLC and establish relationships built on principles of care and respect and strong pride in
their profession (Datnow 2011). PLCs are places to evaluate and enforce professional values
and not merely meetings to implement government initiatives that drive performance. Teachers stand to benefit through the various interlinked learning teams and are able to sharpen
their mastery of content knowledge and pedagogy (Datnow 2011).
3.1.3 Four catalysts of coherence
All successful systems need coherencemechanisms that hold all the efforts and the outcomes together. The Fourth Way is characterized by four catalysts of coherence.
The first catalyst of coherence is sustainable leadership. This is not just about developing
leaders by moving them through a pipeline of preparation and developmentidentifying
talent early, and developing and moving leaders through the rungs that characterized the Third
Way. Rather, it is about addressing how leaders work with other leaders, and how schools
help other schools. In the Fourth Way, if a leader has run a school well, he or she might be
asked to take on a second school and become a principal of two schools so that more can
benefit from the leadership strengths of this principal. This means that the school leader can
grow and develop beyond just one school that he or she is steering whilst the leader has to
ensure distributed leadership within the school so that the school can survive with his or her
departure. The Fourth Way regards leadership as a coherent system where a community of
people work together to support each other across space and time.
The second catalyst of coherence advocates integrating networks. In most efforts at transformation, improvement is dispersed and fails to spread beyond individual clusters. Professional development by reading research reports, listening to speeches or attending workshops
has its limitations. Successful professional development involves sharing, discussion and
lesson studies with fellow educators and results in deeper changes in their own practice. This
is often impossible when there is a no platform for teachers to foster relationships with one
another. This social infrastructure facilitates knowledge sharing which is one of the most
effective avenues to sustain the longevity of best practices and to scale them up beyond individual clusters. With the advances in technology, videos of classroom teaching, materials and
classroom management strategies can be posted online and across geographical boundaries.
Integrating networks unify members of the global professional community to innovate and
continually improve their practices for the benefit of their students.
The third catalyst places responsibility before accountability. Responsibility is what people
jointly undertake for something they deem to be important. Accountability should be the small

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remainder that is left over once responsibility has failed. However, in the Second and Third
Way, people drive the education system through accountability. The result is that often people
give up responsibility because they feel other people above them are taking care of things.
However, teachers can monitor and manage themselves. So the Fourth Way is not about
having no accountability, but about placing responsibility before accountability.
The final catalyst of coherence is about differentiation and diversity. Differentiated instruction for a diverse population is essential for all learners attain their full potential. Understanding learning styles and multiple intelligences enables teachers to customize their teaching
according to their learners needs. Therefore, teachers and educators should continually
engage in professional development to learn from one another about how to meet every childs
learning needs through classroom management, curriculum design, appropriate materials and
responsive pedagogy.
3.2 The Fourth Way revisited
As described above, the Fourth Way is a comprehensive and systemic approach to educational change. The six pillars provide stability; the three principles drive change in teachers
professionalism whilst the four catalysts of coherence ensure the longevity, coherence and
scalability of educational change. The final section focuses on Singapore to discuss how far
it presents a unique case of the Fourth Way in action.

4 Singapore: paving the Fourth Way?

In what ways and to what degree does Singapore possess the characteristics of a Fourth Way
system? In the aspect of pillars for support, Singapore, in the last 15 years, has adopted two
major inspiring and inclusive visions of Thinking Schools, Learning Nation and Teach Less,
Learn More which inspire educators and the nation to promote greater innovation in teaching
and learning that is creative and innovativeindeed mindful in nature (Ng 2008a; Gopinathan
2009). Teaching less creates the time to be mindful; to have white space to develop new
curriculum ideas. What is unique about Singapores education system which has been lauded
as one of the worlds high-performing systems is the fact that the initiatives do not remain
as just a vision but are implemented with great fidelity systemwide. This ensures that the
vision is actualized across the system coherently. Singapores education system contributes
to nation building and collective identity, forging a common purpose and attracting high
calibre teachers to the profession because of the wider purpose that they serve. Education in
Singapore is a significant public investment with a budget that ranks second only to defence.
There is a negligible private sector, which means that all the public and the nation are invested
in the success of the system.
With regard to professionalism, Singapore is progressing towards a nationwide community
of graduate teachers who have an annual entitlement of 100 h of professional development
time where courses are sponsored by the Ministry and supported by school leaders (Goh and
Gopinathan 2008). In 2009, the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST) has been established
by the Ministry of Education to drive a teacher-led culture of professional excellence centred
on the holistic development of the child as expounded in their mission statement (Academy
of Singapore Teachers 2011). Teachers are paid at the level of engineers and other professions when they begin to attract those of high quality into the profession and the number of
teachers already in the profession who will gain Master degrees over the coming decade will
include the total with this growing to about a third of the whole profession. Teachers also

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have different career tracks that they follow with flexibility of movement between them and
continuous monitoring and mentoring to ensure that they are progressing satisfactorily in
their career aspirations and the needs of the system. Having one single institution of teacher
education and leadership development, the National Institute of Education, helps considerably in aligning practices of training and development with government policy and strategy,
which is turn encourages learning continuously from the education professionals themselves.
Coherence in the system is enhanced by the density of the population and the bringing
together of all of key leaders into one room when new policies and directions are being
implemented. The relations amongst the Ministry of Education, the schools and the National
Institute of Education are also ones of intensive and repeated communication as well as frequent exchanges or secondment of personnel, so that the different cultures do not turn into
silos or separate states. Future principals are trained in a common leadership programme (the
Leaders in Education Programme) at the NIE (Ng 2008b), having already been identified
through the course of their emerging career, as having the capacity to perform a senior role.
Principals also rotate between schools to provide different experiences of the system, but not
with frequency or regularity that is either predictable or disruptive. Networks between schools
have also been formed through the introduction of a cluster school system that encourages
sharing and collaboration between and within schools located nearby across the primary,
secondary and tertiary levels (Gopinathan 2009).
These brief examples illustrate how Singapore is very much driving along the path of the
Fourth Way and perhaps even defining it for others, even though it retains some elements
of former ways, as all systems do, in retaining some strong elements of central control, and
having competitive examinations at the point of movement between primary and secondary
schools. Indeed, compared to countries like Finland, the significant contribution that Singapore makes is in its capacity to hold together elements of these different ways along its
pathway to the fourth and somehow to manage the paradoxes that define their simultaneous
coexistence.
In some aspects, Singapore also seems to have gone beyond the Fourth Way. The series of
papers to follow, drawn from key stakeholders from different spectrums within the Singapore
education system (K-12, teacher education, leadership development and internationalization)
provide an opportunity for one to gain a deeper understanding of Singapores journey through
the lenses of the Fourth Way. Some practices fit snugly into the domains marked by the Fourth
Way whilst in other respects, Singapore offers further insights that may challenge or add to
the key principles of the Fourth Way. The use of technology as a tool of pedagogical change
(Ng 2010), for example, is one of these. The Fourth Way is a framework for educators to
consider and is not meant to be prescriptive in nature as a model or a template to replicate. It
hopes to offer a holistic and coherent approach to educational change based on practices and
principles within the most successful systems across the worldincluding Singapore. The
challenge for Singapores education system as a high-performing nation is to seek continual
ways to keep ahead of this curve, to sustain its current peak of excellence and to surmount
new horizons beyond them.

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